Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Field-programmable gate arrays...

There's more at the source. The one sentence summary is "There's a new way to accelerate high definition video for mobile devices."

....Just as there is no free lunch, compression breakthroughs always come with a price: the increased computing requirement to encode (and decode) video for efficient, high quality streaming. With each step forward in video services, there has been a corresponding rise in compute need on the encode side, mainly in the data center. This increase has been on the order of 8x when comparing encoding of SD using H.264 and then moving to HD utilizing HEVC, with another incremental with the move to UltraHD (HEVC). With the upcoming AV1, this increase in compute need will continue.

Hardware Acceleration for Cloud-Based Streaming

Dedicating CPUs to server-based encoding made sense back when most video was SD and a smaller percentage of the overall workload. In the near future, when video becomes 80% of network traffic and codec complexity is 1000x higher, a new specialized compute accelerator needs to be implemented to handle the job of encoding and processing video prior to streaming. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are inherently good at video acceleration because of the flexibility they provide and a main reason why hardware acceleration companies like Xilinx were invited to join the Alliance for Open Media.FPGAs are expected to accelerate AV1 encoding by at least a factor of 10x compared to software-based encoders that run on a CPU. Their programmable and reconfigurable capabilities allow for multiple optimizations across a wide range of encoding profiles in addition to enabling optimization for non-video workloads. As any codec evolves and improves over time, FPGAs ensure cloud data centers always have a state of the art video acceleration solution.